Hi Rachel,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 2: I have 2 or 3 emerging interests but am unsure how to figure out which one to pursue .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were achievement, benevolence, and hedonism.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.
You said your top three talents were analytic, musical, and social.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to be more physically healthy .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said complete all of my homework before Thurs .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said feel more prepared and accomplished .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said distractions (hanging out with friends, phone) .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I get back home from classes then I’ll unpack my bag and get out my laptop to start working on hw. .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in viola .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt motivated when receiving critical feedback, and motivated when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being classes .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .
In one word, you said it made you feel fuzzy .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
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| Grit can depend on the context or situation, and it should be used in good will. |
| It's okay to be on other sides of the quadrant. Boredom shows that you're perhaps missing attention or meaning. |
| Personality changes over time, and characteristics like emotional stability will be improved over time. |
| Every occupation can be considered a job, career, and calling. |
| Use If-Then plans to serve as better cognitive reminders and also help with cue-response links! |
| Success isn't innate, it requires hours and hours of deliberate practice. |
| Try to be in the radical candor quadrant!! |
| Stress is something to harness, and recognizing that stress can lead to optimal results sometimes. But don't be swallowed up by them!! |
| Don't just will your way through things, change your situation to work smart! |
| Seek out authoritative mentors who hold high expectations! |
| While you don't have to be a giver all the time (b/c that would lead to burnout), it's important to think about top-level goal of self-transcendence |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Jake Peralta |
| Rachel is a thoughtful and kind person. She showed she cared in class and over text, being one to check up on people around her and simply ask how they were. She always listened to what people in our group had to say during class discussions and liked to hear about their lives. I admire her genuineness throughout the class; she helped make Grit Lab a more positive experience.
Rachel's discovery project was really cool. As someone who's also wanted to learn about poker at some point, it was nice to see her learning about it throughout the semester. She chose it to go out of her comfort zone and challenge her risk aversion. She continued to improve after her poker tournament and learned from the people around her. I appreciated the attempt to go outside her comfort zone and learn and challenge herself throughout her discovery project. |
| Zora Mardjoko |
| Rachel is a down to earth, warm person, who has an uncanny ability to create a bond of trust with people she meets. She's a great listener and brings an introspective perspective to our team discussions, and I've felt comfortable in sharing things with her because of her chill attitude. She is incredibly thoughtful, and considerate of others. I'm so grateful to have taken Grit Lab this semester, because it introduced me to Rachel :)
Rachel's Discovery Project stood out to me, because of the poker class she took. I was intrigued that her project had an academic side to it, and poker was something I've always been interested by because the people in my life are into it. Attending a poker tournament was never something I considered, but after hearing about Rachel's experience, it's something I might think about. |
We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.